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Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Need a pair of retractable vampire fangs, no questions asked?


This isn't the strangest thing I've seen for sale on Amazon this month (that honor goes to "My Day by Jones," a short story retelling the 1979 film ALIEN from the point of view of the cat.) This set of "retractable vampire fangs" is right up there, though.

Most people probably aren't aware of the arms race among costume manufacturers when it comes to gothic paraphernalia. Most of us see some variation of  "vampire teeth" for sale around Halloween, but some specialized items actually have a year-round shelf life. It's a fairly recent concept that anyone not named "Christoper Lee" would even need a realistic set of vampire fangs, but the rise of cosplay has put these kinds of products in greater demand than ever before.

It started off simple enough back in the 1960s with those dimestore plastic fangs and, for a while, that was good enough for most people. A few years back, though, artists (a group that actually included a few dentists) began to create vampire fangs that not only looked real, but were customized to match the color of your teeth. Before long, costume companies took notice and began looking for a way to produce these for a general audience.

Which brings us to the retractable vampire fangs you see above. Looking at the image, I'm not even sure how these work ... the hinge at the base appears to hide the fangs under your upper lip, but the whole apparatus reminds me of that kind of SAW-esque torture devices used to take x-rays of your teeth. And I've got a gag reflex worthy of a Monty Python sketch.

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6 comments:

  1. Mark GillmanNovember 19, 2014 at 9:22 AM

    I actually got a pair of these to use for my Barnabas costume this year, and I have to say they really felt awkward. They felt like wearing braces all over again. There is no way you can talk and wear them at the same time. It's an ambitious product, but it just really crowds your mouth and feels awkward. The "retraction" is actually just sliding the whole piece up and down

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  2. Cousin BarnabasNovember 19, 2014 at 9:23 AM

    I had a set of clip-on fangs which capped only my canine teeth when I dressed as Barnabas a few years ago. They worked well and looked great ... but left the inside of my bottom lip feeling raw the next day.

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  3. Mark GillmanNovember 19, 2014 at 9:24 AM

    NIce! Not about the lip, but that's cool! Hope you post a pic of your cosplay sometime! I wish the retractable fangs would've worked for me, but at the last minute I went with the set from Elope instead. They worked well, and with them I didn't sound like stupid Peter Brady saying "Porkchopsh and apple shawsh"

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  4. Cousin BarnabasNovember 19, 2014 at 9:31 AM

    I actually forgot to take photos that year ... Sara dressed as Velma from Scooby Doo, but we were having such a good time neither of us stopped to take photos. I did get THIS one when I first tried on the complete costume elements. Which is why there's a shower curtain in the background :)

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  5. Mark GillmanNovember 19, 2014 at 9:41 AM

    SWEET!

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  6. Morgan MistNovember 20, 2014 at 12:22 PM

    There's a vampire pug at Collinswood. Is its bite worse than its bark?

    ReplyDelete

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